The roof is asphalt with the odd patch of gravel that hasn’t yet been carried away by the wind. It’s covered in black tar, which explains why the building is like a slow cooker inside. I start going out on the roof often: in the morning when the sun is low, in the evening, and at night as well. Especially at night. A quotation often wrongly attributed to Margaret Thatcher says that a man who, beyond the age of twenty-six, finds himself on a bus, can count himself as a failure. I’d say the same for anyone who has never broken a rule or spent an hour of their lives observing people from above.

My building is the tallest on the block: 360 degrees of unobstructed view, the perfect perch from which to study neighbourhood life. It also affords one of the few clear views of the sky, which appears in all its immensity, even vaster than what I saw of it from the forests of my childhood. The clouds shift shapes a thousand times before receding from my field of vision, a woolly menagerie for my eyes only. I make sure that every time I go up on the roof, I have my guitar in the case with the blanket. Nothing else. The gun is for another time. Ditto the binoculars. I don’t have a specific reason for visiting the roof, other than enjoying the breeze and the view, but I know it’ll come. Good reasons always come to those who wait. The perfect crime is a gratuitous act. I just have to keep treading lightly.

Still, the plan could be aborted at any time. All it takes is a single person to see me, and the mission is terminated. I wouldn’t be able to go up on the roof anymore, except with the purest of intentions. The plan to use the roof for an upcoming play means I have to make sure no one would ever connect me to the roof. Otherwise it’s too risky. People screw up because they get lazy. They’re not willing to do the groundwork necessary to get away with it. Slackers or cretins.

The bottom line is that I have to keep going up on the roof undetected, and even if someone did see me, it’d be no big deal since all I’d have to do is find a new spot. But I want to make this one work. Even if I still don’t know what for… The roof is like my tree, accessible to very few people, an open-air oasis of solitude surrounded by others.